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The summer of the toads.

When I was 10 years old, my parents sent me to summer camp in upstate New York for a month. I was a weird kid who loved books, was by turns standoffish or overly-friendly, and tended to be bullied at school. At first, I wasn’t too happy about being sent to an unfamiliar environment without the comforts of home, where I’d have to share a cabin with 7 or 8 other girls I’d never met and who probably wouldn’t like me anyway. To be completely honest, being sent away for an entire month felt like a rejection, though I didn’t dare tell my parents that.

But the camping experience wasn’t anywhere near as awful as I expected. It had its good points and its bad. The good: the hikes in the woods, the lake, the campfires, arts and crafts, nature walks, an hour of free time at the end of…